Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is calling on Casey Wasserman to step down as chairperson of LA28 after some emails of his surfaced in the Department of Justice’s Jeffrey Epstein document release.
During an interview on CNN Monday, the mayor said, “I cannot fire him, but I have an opinion. And my opinion is that he should step down. That’s not the opinion of the board.”
Last week, Wasserman was publicly backed by the Los Angeles Olympics Committee board after they hired an outside law firm to review his interactions with Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker connected to Epstein. Their flirtatious correspondence took place in 2003, years before Epstein’s arrest in Palm Beach. “LA28 takes allegations of misconduct seriously, and our Board is committed to thoroughly reviewing any concerns related to the organization’s leadership,” the executive committee wrote. “Mr. Wasserman fully cooperated with the review. We found Mr. Wasserman’s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell did not go beyond what has already been publicly documented.”
Bass made it clear in today’s interview that she disagreed with the board’s decision. “Here, LA28, which is the committee that is involved with the Olympics, has the discretion,” she told CNN. “The board made a decision. I think that decision was unfortunate. I don’t support the decision. I do think that we need to look at the leadership.”
The mayor also called Maxwell’s behavior “abhorrent.”
Bass’s new comments come after she previously avoided commenting on the Wasserman controversy, saying last week that “any decision on the LA28 leadership must be made by the LA28 Board.” It’s unclear what prompted her about-face on Wasserman, who has raised millions of dollars during his decade-long bid to bring the games to the city.
But the mogul has faced a mountain of public backlash, and a spate of client defections, since the massive trove of additional DoJ documents on Epstein were released on Jan. 30. A number of artists, including Chappell Roan and John Summit, have either left his agency already or threatened to leave if he didn’t resign.
After previously saying he “deeply regrets” his past communication with Maxwell, he decided to put his agency up for sale last week amid the controversy, saying that he had “become a distraction” from his company’s operations. (Privately, sources say, he has blamed rival agents like Ari Emanuel for helping to fan the controversy that led to his departure from the company.)
“I’m deeply sorry that my past personal mistakes have caused you so much discomfort,” he wrote in a statement to his 4,000-member staff. “It’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to the clients and partners we represent so vigorously and care so deeply about.”
Elsewhere in the memo, Wasserman said he’ll now be devoting his “full attention to delivering Los Angeles an Olympic Games in 2028 that is worthy of this outstanding city.”
Aside from his decades-old ties to Maxwell, including emails dating back to 2003, Wasserman has maintained that he “never had a personal or business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,” aside from a 2002 philanthropic flight to Africa on Epstein’s plane with Bill Clinton and others.
